Uncertainty in Conversation: Its Formal Cues Across Modalities and Time

Abstract

The topic of this chapter is a particular state of mind: uncertainty. One can experience uncertainty in many contexts and situations: in relation to events past, present and future, persons close and far, tasks, choices, measures, decisions desired or to be avoided, and much more. It is very personal, and therefore it has hardly innumerable forms of expression. Due to its personal nature, one may find it difficult to observe it by trying to associate it with just one or another single behavior, especially that it most often develops as a sequence of behavioral events over time. Based on the HuComTech multimodal corpus and using the computing environment Theme we show a complex of those individual events that, together, contribute to the perception of uncertainty. This complex is essentially temporal, in which patterns of behavior are formed from temporally adjacent or non-adjacent events including physically observable ones as well as those which are only interpretations of certain observations. The data are based on dialogues in Hungarian, but their multimodal analysis can be applied to other language environments as well.

I dedicate this work to Aron, who will always be 27.

This chapter was supported by Grant NKFIH 116402